1. Field
The invention relates to a method for operating cloud computing services in a cloud computing network as well as a cloud computing information system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, cloud computing has become a new computing paradigm. A generally accepted definition of cloud computing and cloud computing services can be described as follows: Cloud computing services may be defined as consumer and business products, services and solutions delivered and consumed in real-time over the Internet. Typically, cloud services are offered as shared services under a virtualised management and accessible over the Internet by people and/or other services via Internet standards. Additionally, cloud services delivered as consumer and/or business products meet the following key attributes: the services are shared meaning that there is a one-to-many relationship. The services are built for a market of consumers and not just a single customer, irrespective of his nature as a private or business customer. Secondly, the solutions are packaged meaning that they are turn-key offerings integrating required resources. Thirdly, they are accessible via the Internet, meaning that they can be accessed by a ubiquitous, but authorized network access. Fourthly, the cloud services comprise the concept of self-service provisioning, meaning that in many—if not in most—cases an intuitive, not hard to handle user interface is available in order to consume the cloud computing services. Fifthly, cloud computing services are dynamic and fine-grained or “elastic” meaning that the service provisioning scales with the number of users accessing the cloud services. Sixthly, the concept of cloud computing relies on a user-based and/or user-oriented pricing model, meaning that a utilization and cost tracking is provided based on individual usage. Seventhly, cloud computing services are using a standard-based user interface, meaning that typically a Web browser or a successor may be used for accessing the cloud services. Lastly, cloud services provide published program and/or services interfaces, meaning that they are mainly based on Web services application programming interfaces (API).
Cloud computing systems provide computing, data, and application services of different kind: public cloud computing systems and private cloud computing systems.
A public cloud computing system is operated by a provider which offers cloud computing services to consumer or business users. A trivial cloud computing service can be a plain computing system or data processing system with an operating system. The consumer—either an individual, private user or a business user—may use this computing system to install his own application and use it. Another cloud computing service may be a Web-service, where the cloud computing service provider provides a computer with an operating system and Web-server software installed which the consumer may use. Yet another example for a cloud computing service is a storage service, wherein the cloud computing service provider provides a storage system accessible via the Internet or a dedicated network line by the consumer with one or multiple interface protocols such as NFS, CIFS, FTP, HTTP, and WebDAV, which the consumer may use to store data. Even complex services—like a customer relationship management system—composed of multiple applications providing one or more interfaces may be seen as a service provided out of a cloud computing environment.
In contrast to a public cloud computing system, a private cloud computing system is designed for and access-restricted to a single enterprise or a so-called extended enterprise, which includes also partner enterprises. In a private cloud computing system, there are internally shared resources in form of cloud computing services and not a commercial offering to the public market.
Thus, the concept of cloud computing systems relies on the Internet or connectivity via the same Internet protocols being used via dedicated lines. Typical cloud computing systems comprise cloud computing nodes providing cloud computing services, cloud computing networks, consumer interfaces, one or more external networks, via which the consumer workstation may be connected to cloud computing nodes in the form of data processing systems, or simply “to the cloud”, and monitoring and management components.
Cloud computing nodes are essentially computing systems or data processing systems, which are configured with software programs such as an operating system and applications providing cloud computing services. Cloud computing services are typically represented by software. Cloud computing nodes may also comprise data storage systems, which may be included in the cloud node or which may be externally attached to one or more cloud computing nodes, e.g., via a storage area network (SAN).
Cloud computing networks may be used to connect cloud computing nodes among each other for internal cloud processing. Cloud computing networks are closed networks within the cloud system and not visible to the consumer. Cloud computing networks may, for example, be based on Ethernet or fibre channel. A plurality of cloud computing networks may exist in a cloud computing system. Consumer interfaces may be interfaces over which the consumer can access the cloud services. An interface may be a protocol, which runs on a certain hardware. There are different types of interfaces, which are determined by the cloud service provided by the cloud computing node. For example, a cloud computing node, which provides a Web-server service for a Web-services interface may be based on Ethernet and TCP/IP.
Another cloud computing node may provide a plain operating system with an interface based on SSH via Ethernet or TCP/IP. External networks are used by computing systems of the consumer—either private or within an enterprise—to access the cloud computing services via the consumer interface. External networks do not have access to internal networks. The consumer of cloud computing services may access the cloud computing services and/or applications via a Web browser or another application via an API. An example of a Web-browser delivered cloud computing service would be a geographic routing service. Access via a non-visual software component is also possible.
By using virtualization technologies, a cloud computing node represented as hardware may contain a large number of virtualized data processing systems. Larger cloud computing networks may consist of hundreds of thousands of virtualized nodes running on tens of thousands of physical cloud computing nodes in the form of data processing systems. In principle, the size of a cloud, or a cloud computing network, is not limited.
Monitoring and management components are available to obtain the software levels of operating systems and applications in addition to the hardware and firmware levels and details for each cloud computing node and store these in a database typically called configuration management database (CMDB). Furthermore, monitoring systems comprise methods to collect status and error information for each cloud node building the hardware and software stack. Management components allow monitoring, operating and changing of a configuration of individual cloud computing nodes in cloud computing network or networks.
Hardware and software components building up a hardware and software stack can change for various reasons like introducing, maintaining, increasing, decreasing, and removing services and resources. Such a stack may consist of multiple components leading to a very high number of possible configurations kept in the CMDB.
If in a business-to-business (B2B) environment cloud computing services are used, they are either used by individual end users of the enterprise or by the IT department of the enterprise. In contrast to individual consumers, enterprises are defining security policies on confidentiality of their business data, their IT business processes, their statistical data like utilization of their IT applications and services, their hardware and software being used, and all information of the enterprise itself. Even in this case, there will be a mixture of classical IT operations that deploy hardware and software systems inside an enterprise by its own IT centre and externally provided cloud computing services by a cloud computing provider. By moving applications or parts thereof into a public or private cloud, enterprises may take advantage by changing their related security policies on such information and data.
Based on the above, there may be a need for improving knowledge about cloud computing services configurations, hardware and software stack configurations, experiences made with cloud computing systems and other framing parameters related to cloud computing systems.